… because Linden Lab just announced new last name options (above). Whoever gets to be That's Amore gets their own damn theme song:
My Patreon Supporters
Hypnotic Romance, an SL sim with secluded spaces for couples. Click here to teleport.
The Virtual Worlds Museum. Click here to teleport to their Second Life hub with tribute to sunsetted worlds!
“TV POWWW!” by Tom Boellstorff & Braxton Soderman. Read about the first televised videogame here.
The Fitting Room: Try out new SL fits in a secure, private space. Click here to teleport.
Breedables CoOp, helping the SL pet community grow through shared resources. Go here to get started.
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Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
I just discovered 🌸’s photostream and fell in love with her pictures. Before I get into them, though, can I just say I really dislike this new trend in pictograph or other non-name naming on Flickr. I really have no idea who 🌸 is and that makes me sad. But back to the picture. At first glance I thought this was a striking abstract without even perceiving the avatar, but with a closer look, I loved it even more. It makes me think of Dominique De Menil who argues that our minds are so cluttered with images that only abstraction can bring us “to the threshold of the divine.” She said something else that might make sense with this picture, too. “Perhaps only silence and love do justice to a great work of art.”
More fabulous portraits ahead.
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Apple has posted over 40 job AR/VR openings since last August, which more than any recent rumor swirling about, convinces me that Apple is moving into the AR/VR space.
But! 40 or so employees is actually not that much amid a company with nearly 150,000 total staff. (And translates to Apple paying these new hires roughly $10 million a year, a pittance for a firm of such size to pay.) More key, competitor Oculus has 1,300 employees listed on LinkedIn, while a significant portion of Sony PlayStation's 8000 employees are dedicated on some level to developing for the VR market leader, PSVR.
My take: Apple is still in very early, prototype stages of any VR/AR headset launch it has planned, and don't expect an Apple HMD to hit the market a year or two before you see them start hiring AR/VR developers by the hundreds and hundreds.
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While many of us have talked about how the addition of offline mesh transformed Second Life into a consumer-focused world, educator Joe "Iggy" Essid offered this comment on how it hurt virtual world teaching projects like his:
I recall when Mesh arrived. Most of us in the .edu sector had already left, but I thought "there goes another magical SL experience": team-builds in-world. I think two students I knew could make things in Blender, and even then, it would be made outside SL and imported.
The magic of SL was always when folks interacted, in there. I didn't mind how much more realistic mesh avatars looked or how clunky the physics-engine proved; we were not building avatars or scripting HUDs, but we were making the spaces where avatars interact. I'm not a coder, so I imagine in-world building tools for mesh would be laggy and complex, but then building itself was complex already, the permissions system a mess, and the UI for SL clunky in the extreme.
Had in-world mesh tools existed, some of us in education would have soldiered on and given away Creative Commons content to colleagues, as a brave handful still do in OpenSim. Sure, we could keep using prims, but after a while, our builds would resemble the black-and-white people in Snowcrash's color Metaverse.
We dismantled our project, a virtual House of Usher peopled with actors, one of whom went on to win SF's Nebula Award. I also took down the version in OpenSim, after the host we had closed shop.
A former Linden told me "hey, buy some cool stuff from Turbosquid and import it to jazz up your build."
Sounded good until I priced it. Four items would blow the entire budget. We had already lost two hosts because of the .edu discount coming to an end. Game over.
Essid discusses his project to create a roleplay experience based on Poe's Fall of the House of Usher in this academic paper here and for HyperGrid Business here.
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- Second Life Co-Founder Cory Ondrejka: Adding Mesh To SL Without In-World Editing Tools Was A Mistake
- Afrofuturist Nettrice Gaskins On Black Algorithms & Her Neural Net Portrait Of Stacey Abrams
- Few ROBLOX User Creators Make Much Money From Their Creations
- Philip Rosedale Created This Amazing Simulation To Explain Wealth Inequity
- Bridgerton Virtual World Cosplay Stylishly Soirées Into Second Life
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Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
Madison Mars’ blog The MadyMoo is a fun blog that features youthful looks with short skirts and shorter shorts. “You Broke Me First” is her post #334 and has a cute sporty outfit with gorgeous shoes. The post title is from a song which she embeds in her post.
- Jacket: EVIE – Cold Freak – Jacket
- Sweater: EVIE – Cold Freak – Sweater – Black
- Skirt: EVIE – Cold Freak – Denim Skirt – White
- Sneakers: EVIE – Cold Freak – Sneakers
Madison also features a few posts with other people.
